Many organizations are doing amazing things with the Drupal framework and innovating by breaking through prior limitations. However, there is limited knowledge sharing and discussion happening among the biggest Drupal users. As a result, similar problems are often solved multiple times independently, and in incompatible ways. And since few of these large companies are vocal and active in the community, the expertise and code gained from solving these problems isn't making its way back into the software that all Drupal users rely on. To help solve these issues, Acquia created and launched an innovative strategic alliance, the Large Scale Drupal Membership Program

Large Scale Drupal is a consortium of enterprise Drupal users who meet regularly to discuss and collaborate on common problems. Current members include the leading users of Drupal in many industries - Disney, NBC Universal, Riot Games, UCSF, PayPal, and many others. We provide a forum for these large organizations, listen to their needs, prioritize them as a group, and then figure out the proper way to address those needs through knowledge sharing, white papers, training and collaborative software development projects. The intent is not to keep the outcome of these efforts within the group - we share what we learn with the specific intent of it becoming a contributed back to Drupal and the community.

Working together with each other, and the Drupal community, Large Scale Drupal members save money (sharing development costs creates economies of scale) and in doing so they create significantly better software by leveraging the input of a diverse range of participants - some of the most talented people in the community. Furthermore, collaborative solutions that are developed openly in the community will last longer and provide longer-term value for everyone as a shared solution will continue to be enhanced by the partnership and community. The Drupal community benefits by gaining new contributions to Drupal, and an influx of expert talent into the Drupal contributor pool. Both the contributions of these companies, and the expertise that they bring to the table will help Drupal remain a long-term viable project.

In this talk, I’ll give a high level overview of the Large Scale Drupal Strategic Alliance, the types of problems we are solving, how we do our work through partners (vendors and services companies that are active contributors in the community) funneling money back into the community, and present a strong business case for collaborative and open development in the enterprise - why you and your organization benefit by participating in the open source process. I’ll talk briefly about existing projects and goals and the success we’ve seen to date, as well as future initiatives and plans, and take questions from the audience at the end of the presentation.